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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

On Sacred Tides: Maritime Buddhism and moving from the Silk Road to a “Great Circle”

from Buddhistdoor International

Network of Land and Sea routes

by Raymond Lam
2012-06-01

Imagine you’re about to sail the azure sea and reap its more positive
maritime possibilities: trade, prosperity, or perhaps cultural
exchange. But have you thought about the perilous journeys your cross
necklace or wrist beads undergo to journey with their owners? Religious
artifacts embody something at once primal and transcendent about human
nature. People have been known to protect religious articles to the
point of happily overriding their own basic sense of self-preservation.
What a story, then, must it be for a devout person to embark on the seas
with their pious statues, small shrines, sculptures, and even talismans
or jewelry.
Here is something truly worth setting sail for: the ECAI Atlas of
Maritime Buddhism Project. It’s an initiative to building new
understandings of the Buddhist past. For more than a century we have
seen the growth of interest in Silk Road research, and the
identification of these mercantile routes as the major element in the
transmission of Buddhism to China. But there is considerable available
knowledge about Buddhist pilgrims, Buddhist kingdoms, and trade routes
in South and Southeast Asia, and a growing awareness of the maritime
contribution to the global network of trade and cultural diffusion.
As a historical project, the Atlas involves ambitious things:
building a global team of researchers*, utilizing new data collection
technologies, and using advanced data mapping and visualization to
integrate cutting-edge results about the movements and trails of bygone
ships and sailors.
Historically, mercantile activity was closely tied to the spread of
Buddhism. We know that Buddhism was in many ways a religion of merchants
as it made its way up and over the Pamir Mountains and into the Tarim
basin. But the savvy dealers of Eurasia were not limited to caravans.
There was an important group that operated a circuit of sea trade. And
hence the million-dollar question: What was the role of these sea
traders in the cultural life of Buddhism and, indeed, Eurasia? How does
maritime Buddhism fit into the bigger picture of world history?
Buddhist history, like all other “histories,” can’t be understood in a
vacuum. Non-Buddhist events like Alexander’s invasion of India and the
rise of Islam all impacted trade and culture, and therefore had an
effect on Buddhism too. We don’t have a complete picture of the
diffusion process, but we do have some ideas about the impact of
Buddhism on certain maritime trade and kingdoms.
Take Tamil Nadu, for instance. It had an intensive maritime trade
link with western countries, Chinese and Southeast Asian regions. The
numerous Roman coins and pottery attest to its role as a trading hub
between South Asian, African and Mediterranean regions. There are also a
good number of Chinese coins and products from China and Southeast
Asia. The famous Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang (he visited India in 629 –
645), wrote of a place called Molo-ku-ta or Malakuta at Tamil Nadu.
During his visit, he recorded that he saw many remains of old
monasteries. Xuanzang also mentioned Kancipuram, which apparently had
dozens of vihāras that were all populated by monks of the Sthaviravāda
tradition. He might have been exaggerating when he talked of “ten
thousand” monks (a suspiciously round number), but it doesn’t change the
intriguing reality that the majority of locales with Buddhist remains
are also reported to have flourished as trade centers, yielding Chinese
and South-East Asian pottery datable from the 9th to 14th centuries –
almost the entirety of the medieval period.
Or what about Kavirippumpattinam, the celebrated capital and port
city of the illustrious Cholas of the Cankam civilization (2nd century
BC to 2nd century AD)? Ptolemy of the first century referred to this
place as Kaberis Emporion, and Periplus of the Erthrian Sea called it as
Camara. Tamil literature of the first three centuries AD gives a vivid
account of Cholas, its harbor, sailors, merchants, and wares. Once more,
a large number of Roman, Chinese and Southeast Asian materials have
found here.
Exploring the Great Circle
The Atlas can show us how Buddhists of ancient times traveled the
great circle. The preservation of archaeological sites is obviously
imperative, since they contain Buddhist remains. Shipwrecks give us
information about how materials were transported and traded. But we
still don’t know what the pattern of migration, trade and diffusion was.
How was it that Buddhism came to China influenced by its journey
through South and Southeast Asia? What was the impact of Southeast Asian
ideas on Buddhist culture, like the writing of Buddhist texts?
There is much to do. Primary approaches to research would include
making digitally dynamic maps with the traditional historical,
contextual maps, collating a GIS collection of sites, harbor locations,
and shipwrecks, cataloguing locations and characteristics of Buddhist
materials in historical sites and on ships, and digitizing artifacts,
images, and inscriptions. As if this were not enough, there’s more. A
truly modern and high-tech approach to research involves 3D,
user-interactive data capturing and inscriptional and artistic details
that reveal the nature of Buddhist activities. Kevin Cain of Insight
Digital will be one of the collaborators in helping to preserve this
cultural heritage.
The Silk Road remains one of the most important processes by which
Buddhism spread across Eurasia. But if we look at the intriguing
Buddhist artifacts excavated, from western India to Java, we find an
equally exciting and inspiring history. Professor Lewis Lancaster is one
of the scholars who have been making inroads in this field of studies.
Perhaps it really is time for the Silk Road was “upgraded,” so to speak,
into the Great Circle of Buddhism. It mightn’t sound so romantic, but
it certainly is more accurate – and cutting-edge.
* Project Partners:
INSIGHT http://www.insightdigital.org
Institute for Study and Integration of Graphical Heritage Techniques
University of California (Berkeley) http://berkeley.edu/
Academia Sinica (Taiwan) http://www.sinica.edu.tw/main_e.shtml
University of Paris, Central Research Center
French National Centre for Scientific Research, (C.N.R.S) http://www.cnrs.fr/index.php
École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) http://www.efeo.fr/index.php?l=EN
Archaeological Survey of India http://asi.nic.in/
National University of Singapore http://www.nus.edu.sg/
Institute of South East Asian Studies, Singapore http://www.iseas.edu.sg/
The Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Iseas) http://nsc.iseas.edu.sg/upcoming_events.htm
University of the West, Rosemead, California http://www.uwest.edu/site/Atlas of Martime Buddhism
Contact Information
Professor Lewis Lancaster
Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI)http://www.ecai.org/
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: buddhst@berkeley.edu
Jeanette Zerneke
ECAI Technical Director
E-mail: jlz@berkeley.edu